Fighting the Last War

I saw this in a comment over at QandO:

When war starts, those in command are ready to fight the “last” war.

Sometimes I wonder if people really understand what it takes to fight "the next war." Since that is a big part of my job, you need to understand that it isn't easy.

Fixing the problems of the last war is easy because you know what they were. The enemy had better tanks. The enemy was more flexible or could blend into the populace, etc. You're dealing with known quantities not future hypotheticals.

Fixing those problems is also important because if everyone doesn't know those problems already, they soon will. Which means your next enemy will attempt to exploit your old failings. Part of the reasons the Islamic world started the War on Terror was because they thought the US had a glass jaw. They got that impression in US operations in Somalia and the Balkans. So they figured they'd bloody our noses and we'd run away like last time. It didn't work out that way, because we learned the lesson of the last war and they made some bad assumptions about American character. Preparing to fight the last war is not an entirely bad thing.

Fixing the problems of the next war is much harder in comparison. Preparing to fight the next war means guessing what the next war will look like. You have to do this before you can even attempt to understand your future shortcomings. We have a lot of people in the military trying to do this through intelligence gathering, analysis, wargaming, etc. It isn't easy, especially when you consider that your predictions need to made with enough lead time (a decade at least) so we can make a course correction. The military will need that much time to field a new system or institute new training. Not easy.

Also keep in mind that your enemies are watching you just like you are watching them. The whole situation is dynamic. The preparations you make a decade in advance will alter the military future you are planning to meet. When the next war comes, your preparations (and what your enemy understands of them) will shape how they fight you. You will miss the target by some amount. It is almost guaranteed.

When people talk about generals "fighting the last war," they make it sound so easy to fight the next war. Like the brass have their heads in the sand or up their asses. Let me tell you, most of them don't. The reason those people (college professors, journalists, etc.) make fighting the next war sound easy is because those people have no idea what it takes to do it. So, like a bad manager, they assume the task they are assigning must be easy out of total ignorance.